A Recruiter’s Guide to SEO: Making a Website your No.1 Consultant (Part Three)

In terms of SEO, a job advert is a fully optimisable new page on a recruitment agency website. This means that a job advert has the ability to help or hinder your current ranking. Here are some of the key areas that are overlooked but have a direct effect on the number of candidates that find your current vacancies.

• As mentioned, a job advert is a new page in your website. The majority of job adverts we see from Recruitment agencies show within the URL a number instead of the relevant keywords. This means nothing to Google. ”Sales” and “Leeds” however does. Optimise all of the on-page elements.

WRONG

….co.uk/vacancy.detail.php?id=56038ed75da339bd88e6d5222a807f27

A URL for a Sales Role in Leeds, but how would google know?

RIGHT

…. co.uk/jobs-34178-Business-Development-Manager–Technical-Sales–London

A clear Indexable URL structure which Google can recognises (the number used is simple a differentiator when working on several role with the same title)

• Make the content of the job posting unique. If you post the same content for every “sales executive” role then you run the risk of creating duplicate content. Be creative with the content, based around your keywords, which then acts a unique page of content.
• Submit any vacancies that have been filled into an “Archive folder”. If the content is original it gives you the opportunity to still receive an indexed page within Google but not directly show an old unrelated vacancy. Candidates can also look at past roles to see if future roles may be relevant to them.
• Use relevant Links at this point, e.g. “Life as a Sales Executive” (An exciting day in the life of a placed candidate article) but not too many as you do not want to divert the candidate away from submitting their CV at this point.
• Candidates will pay less attention to jobs that show the salary as “negotiable” or “competitive”. The very best candidates know what they are worth and will have a salary in mind. “Negotiable” and “competitive” have connotations of a low salary and an employer scrimping on the starting salary so beware of this! If your consultants use this, get them to stop. Even if the salary is minimum wage, state it, as this saves the most valuable currency of all, time, for all parties.

Call to Action- If a potential placement has found your job advert you have done the hard work. Now all you have to do is capture the candidate details, preferable a CV, in order to make the initial call. Give the candidate very clear instructions to “Apply now”, as well as the consultant’s contact details to have that initial conversation. All the candidate needs to do now is place and smash their quarterly target, that easy!